


Dark Matter

by devovitsuasartes



Series: Maintenance [2]
Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Aliens, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Androids, IN SPACE!, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 08:47:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14766371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devovitsuasartes/pseuds/devovitsuasartes
Summary: Eight years into a colony mission, a ship's maintenance worker and its maintenance android discover an anomaly in space.A one-shot set in the Maintenance-verse.





	Dark Matter

**Author's Note:**

> If you haven't read [Maintenance](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10942020?view_full_work=true) all you really need to know is that Mickey is an engineer, Ian is an android, and they're the only conscious passengers on a colony ship traveling through space.
> 
> And sometimes they bang.

Mickey spots it first, on the long-range scanners. He’s doing system check-ups on the bridge, humming along tunelessly to the AC/DC blasting out of his earbuds, already thinking about what he’s going to have for lunch. He’s not being half-assed about the check-ups, really, he isn’t. He’s just been doing these same check-ups once a week for the past eight years, and they no longer require his full concentration.

His first thought upon seeing the object on the scanners is that it’s some kind of bug. He frowns, rubs at it with his sleeve to make sure it’s nothing on the surface of the screen, then bangs on the side of the display to see if there’s a loose connection causing the thing to fritz out. When it remains stubbornly there, Mickey opens up the console’s hologram mode and sure enough, there’s an object out there. It’s a couple of dozen light-years away, and a few thousand miles across - about the size of a small planet.

Mickey scowls at it like it’s personally offended him, and gestures with his hands to zoom in on the thing, but they’re too far away to get a clear picture of it. It’s just a blob. A blob that shouldn’t be there.

“Something wrong?”

Mickey doesn’t even look behind him when he hears the question. It’s not like he has to check to see who it is; there are only two people on this ship who are actually conscious. “I got an anomaly on the long-range scanners.”

Ian joins him at the display, and Mickey does glance over at him then. The android gazes up evenly at the display, the bright spot of holographic object reflected in his eyes. “Huh.”

When it’s clear that Ian isn’t about to follow that up with anything, Mickey scoffs. “Amazing. Millions of dollars worth of tech, centuries of AI fine-tuning, and what have we got? ‘Huh.’ I don’t know what I’d do without that superhuman brainpower…”

“Stop flirting with me, Mickey, I’m trying to think.”

Ian’s still looking up at the hologram, but there’s a wry smile playing at the corners of his mouth. Mickey’s been a horrible influence on him. He’s definitely voided Ian’s warranty, in more ways than one.

Determined not to give away any amusement, Mickey carries on. “Alright, genius, what the fuck is it?”

“Looks like an anomaly to me, Mick.”

Mickey clenches his jaw. “Well what the fuck is an _anomaly_ doing all the way out here?” They’ve left the Milky Way now, and they’re traversing the vast emptiness that lies between their home galaxy and Andromeda. There shouldn’t be anything out here except for photons and dark matter.

“If we knew that, it wouldn’t be an anomaly.”

Mickey rounds on Ian, fists clenched, eyebrows raised, shoulders squared - conveying a threat of impending violence with every atom of his body. It’s a move that used to make grown men shake in their boots back on Earth, but Ian just carries on looking over Mickey’s head at the holograph.

“We’ll monitor it,” Ian says at last, shutting down the display. “See if it’s fixed, or moving.”

“There shouldn’t be anything out here.”

“ _We’re_ out here.”

Their eyes meet at last. Mickey _knows_ that they’re both having the same thought, even though his brain is made of grey matter and Ian’s is made of ones and zeros. He doesn’t want to be the first one to say it, though, and it looks like Ian isn’t going to say it either.

 

* * *

 

Mickey lasts about six hours. He holds it in all day, distracting himself with routine work around the ship, checking and double-checking systems. He holds it in while he eats his dinner in the mess hall, glaring at Ian out of the corner of his eye as the android sits placidly at his recharging station.

The ship’s artificial day winds down, the lights dimming to mimic sunset on Earth, and Mickey heads up to the Observation Deck. He moved out of his little cabin not long after he and Ian first started hooking up, and little by little he’s transformed a corner of the deck into a sprawling open-plan home. There’s a bed, a workshop for his various engineering projects, a video game station, a shower unit that he rigged up, and a high-powered telescope for stargazing.

Now that they’re out here in empty space there’s a lot less light pollution from nearby stars, making it easier to see the breathtaking majesty of space - the pinwheels of nearby galaxies and the far-off constellations. They have a clear view of Andromeda, a bright spot in the distance. But when Mickey tries to use the telescope to get a visual on the anomaly, he comes up with nothing.

He hears movement behind him. He doesn’t look around, but he can’t hold it in any longer.

“It’s aliens,” he bursts out, a little taken aback at how angry he sounds. He doesn’t feel angry. He feels stupidly, childishly excited. “It’s gotta be fucking aliens. It’s aliens, Ian.”

There’s a moment of silence. Then Ian says, “You thought that weird-shaped asteroid was aliens too.”

Mickey pulls away from the telescope, turns around and _glares_.

“And there was that one time you thought aliens were trying to contact us over the comms, but it turns out you just left Die Hard running on one of the monitors on the bridge.”

“You’re never gonna let that shit go, are you?”

“Also there was that time I surprised you coming round a corner and you thought _I_ was an alien…”

“This is a random fucking planet-sized object out in fucking empty space where there shouldn’t be anything!” Mickey explodes. He can feel that he’s gone bright red, and the knowledge isn’t helping his temper. Neither is the shit-eating grin on Ian’s face. “You seriously think that intelligent life happened to evolve on _our_ stupid-ass rock and _nowhere else_ in the entire universe…”

Ian raises his hands placatingly, still smiling, but a little fondly now. “I’m just fucking with you,” he says. He’s developed a real potty mouth from living with Mickey. “It may… actually be aliens this time,” he concedes. “Maybe.”

Mickey settles down fractionally. “You’re goddamn right,” he mutters. He walks past Ian, unzipping his jumpsuit as he goes. He can feel Ian’s eyes on his skin as he sheds his clothing.

Oh yeah, there may be another reason why Mickey is so easily wound up these days. It might be because he hasn’t had sex for over six months.

It’s happened before. They had an epic blowout once where they didn’t even speak to each other for weeks. Mickey can barely remember how it started now - something to do with his own insecurities, for sure. This time, though, the break was Ian’s decision, and it wasn’t because of a fight or anything like that. Just one night, seemingly a random night, Mickey tried to drag Ian to bed and the android stiffened and held him off, and said:

“I don’t want to.”

Mickey had managed to hide the way the words made him suddenly feel like there was a lump of lead in his stomach. He’d backed off, and despite wanting to demand to know the exact reason why Ian had apparently had enough of him, he’d said, “Fine. Whatever.”

He’d waited for Ian to initiate sex, figuring it would only be a matter of time. But days went by, and then weeks, without Ian making a move. Now Mickey thinks that maybe Ian’s just lost interest in sex. He doesn’t know how it works for androids. Maybe Ian just wanted to run down the list of all the ways it’s possible to have sex with someone (they’d been pretty thorough), and now that he’s done them all… that’s it.

Fine. Whatever.

Mickey’s not going to push it. Their… relationship started off in a really fucked up place, and Mickey doesn’t ever want to go back to that place. It makes him cringe to think about - the way he treated Ian like an object, like he was just there to be used. If Ian doesn’t want to have sex any more, then Mickey will just have to deal with it.

 _But why?_ he wants to scream, approximately fifty times a week. _Did I do something wrong? Was I bad at it? Did I change? Am I not fuckable any more? Was it boring? Were you ever even into it the first place, or were you just trying to keep me happy? Was it all bullshit? Are we seriously never going to fuck ever again? You know that means I’ll never fuck anyone ever again, right?_

What. Ever.

Mickey strips down to his boxers and gets into bed. He threads his fingers together behind his head and stares up at the stars, unconsciously searching with his naked eye for the object that he couldn’t even see with a telescope. After a while, he realizes that Ian is still standing awkwardly nearby. He looks up, not daring to hope.

“Can I try something?” Ian asks.

 _Oh god fuck please yes anything literally fucking anything I’ll take anything holy fuck_. Out loud, Mickey replies, casually, “Depends what it is.”

“Move over.”

Mickey’s heart is pounding. He rolls his eyes and shuffles over in the bed, leaving room on one side. Ian approaches, unzipping his jumpsuit as he walks, letting it drop down around his ankles and smoothly stepping out of it. He’s naked underneath, and Mickey is already half-hard by the time Ian sits down on the edge of the bed.

_Oh fuck is it over is the dry spell over please fucking say that it’s over anything literally anything even just a handjob please._

“Pretty sure you’ve tried that before,” Mickey says drily.

Ian gets under the sheets, pulling them up to his chest, glancing over at Mickey like he’s trying to make sure he’s done it right. Mickey settles his head back down on the pillow, his heart still racing in anticipation. This close, he can make out the faint freckles on Ian’s skin, see the incredible details of his pores and the faint line between his brows, the slightly dewy skin of his eyelids as he closes his eyes, the slow rise and fall of his chest.

Mickey swallows. He reaches out, tentatively, and brushes his knuckles against Ian’s thigh, feeling the wiry curls of hair.

“Ian?” he whispers huskily, not really knowing what he’s asking.

Ian doesn’t respond.

Slowly, it dawns on Mickey that Ian is asleep.

“Son of a bitch,” Mickey grits out through his teeth, staring disbelievingly at Ian’s peaceful face.

He didn’t even know Ian _could_ sleep. It must be some kind of standby mode.

Mickey stares up at the stars again, buries his hands in his hair, his biceps flexed in frustration. He’s going to have to try and will his boner away. There’s no way he’s jerking off with Ian passed out in the bed.

“I hate you so much.”

 

* * *

 

The anomaly is moving.

Oh, but it’s not just moving.

It’s _following_ them.

“We don’t know that, Mickey.”

Ian leans back against a console, his arms folded, his expression infuriatingly skeptical. Mickey glares at him, and jabs his finger at the display.

“It was twenty-six-point-two lightyears away the first time we spotted it.” He makes a mark on the hologram. “Forty-eight hours later, it’s fourteen-point-six lightyears away.” He makes a second mark. “Now it’s two-point-zero lightyears away.” He makes a third mark, and draws a line between the marks with a triumphant flourish. “It’s not just getting closer, it’s accelerating towards us, on a curve. It changed its fucking trajectory because it’s _following_ us, because it’s _aliens_ …”

“Or because we’re the only thing out here with any kind of gravitational pull.”

Mickey slams his fist down on the long-range scanner console, making the hologram flicker. “It’s _aliens_.”

Ian is smirking, the shithead. “You really want to meet some aliens, huh?”

“Oh right, I’m the stupid asshole just because _I_ have a fucking soul.”

It comes out harsher than he means it to, and Ian’s grin fades. Mickey clenches his jaw, feeling like a real asshole, but he doesn’t apologize. He mutters something about wanting to see if he can get a visual on the object, and heads for the Observation Deck, leaving Ian behind.

 

* * *

 

The first time Mickey spots it on the telescope, he thinks it’s just a smudge on the lens. It’s a blot of darkness that blocks out the stars behind it. Then he zooms in, and he sees it properly.

It’s not round, like a planet. It’s weird and geometric - like a deformed black brick edged with spikes. There are no lights on it, no markings, no little green men waving out of a porthole. It just looms, sinister, in the darkness.

Mickey runs to the bridge, cold sweat trickling down his spine, and takes another look at the object on the scanners, measuring its current relative distance. It’s closer, but slowing down now, like it’s trying to avoid crashing into them. It’s absolutely vast compared to The New Hope: an object the size of Mars, approaching a ship the size of Rome. If they collided, The New Hope would make no more impact than a bug on the windshield of a monster truck.

They’re close enough now, and there’s so little matter in between them, that the comms should work. Feeling sick with nerves, and feeling kind of stupid since he could just be talking to a big space rock, Mickey opens up a channel.

“This is the colony ship The New Hope,” he says, surprised by how steady his voice sounds. “Please respond.”

He waits, tensed, not even breathing. He nearly jumps out of his skin when he hears a voice - though it’s not coming from the comms speakers.

“Mickey, what are you…”

“Shhhh!” Mickey hushes, sounding nearly hysterical, flapping a hand at Ian, who has just emerged onto the bridge. The android raises his eyebrows, and approaches slowly as Mickey listens.

After a minute or so, he tries again.

“I repeat, this is the colony ship The New Hope. We come in peace.” Mickey pre-emptively flips the bird at Ian. “Please respond.”

The silence that follows is tense. When it gets unbearable, Mickey glances over at Ian. To his surprise, the android isn’t looking at him pityingly, or mockingly. His expression is actually kind of unreadable.

There’s a hiss of noise over the comms channel. Then another. Then quick, staccato bursts of white noise.

Maybe it’s just wishful thinking. Maybe Mickey’s just fooling himself. Maybe he just really wants to believe. But…

“They’re communicating,” Ian says quietly, sounding awed.

Mickey stares at him, waiting for a punchline, waiting for Ian to smirk and let the pretense fall away. But it doesn’t happen.

“They?” Mickey echoes, not trusting himself to say anything else.

Ian nods, listening to the almost musical bursts of static. “There are patterns in it. There’s no question. It’s deliberate. Intelligent.”

Mickey is breathing hard through his nose. “Fucking say it,” he demands, quietly. “You’ve been making fun of me for years, so I wanna hear you fucking say…”

“It’s aliens,” Ian confirms easily.

Mickey sags against the console. Then he opens up their comms again and says, breathlessly, laughing through the words, “Yeah, we can hear you. We’re here. We’re fucking _here_ , holy shit.”

He’s dizzy, reeling, kind of embarrassed by how excited he is and his inability to hide it, but it’s _aliens_ , fucking _aliens_. This is it, First Contact, capital-F, capital-C, and it’s Mickey Milkovich’s finger on the button. Low-down criminal street scum Mickey Milkovich, who was never supposed to amount to anything, is making first contact on behalf of his entire species, and…

His arms are around Ian. Ian’s holding him tightly. He doesn’t know which one of them grabbed the other first. All he knows is that he can feel Ian smiling against his neck, and Ian’s body is _so hot_ , burning through his jumpsuit, like he’s using all of his available processing power to try and fathom what's happening right now.

“What did I fucking say?” Mickey mutters in Ian’s ear, as the aliens respond with more bursts of noise, strange distortions in it now. Maybe it’s just Mickey’s imagination, but they sound excited. “Fucking aliens.”

Ian laughs, pulls away a little, buries his fingers in Mickey’s hair and frames Mickey’s face with his thumbs, smiling at him broadly. “You know they probably think ‘fuck’ is a really important human word now?”

“Goddamn right.”

They monitor the object for the next few hours, sending verbal communications across the comms channel and recording the static that they get in return. They can’t tell if it’s an alien ship, or the object actually _is_ an alien - some vast being that formed out here in the space between galaxies. According to their scanners its temperature is considerable warmer than the background cosmic radiation - a veritable hot spot at minus one hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit. It keeps closing in until it’s about eight hundred million kilometers away, and then stays there - travelling the same speed as The New Hope, in the same direction.

Ian wears his battery out within in hour trying to translate the bursts of noise they’re getting over the comms, and has to go and sit down at the bridge’s recharging port, his brow furrowed in concentration. Mickey paces anxiously, glancing over every few minutes, occasionally sending missives back across the void - anything he can think of. He repeat words like _Human_ and _Earth_ over and over, so the aliens will know those words are important. He says _Friends_ and _Peace_ too, even though it’s cheesy as shit. He transmits the coordinates of where they’re going, though he doesn’t even know if the aliens will be able to understand their concept of coordinates.

“They’re _really_ alien,” Ian says at last, sounding a little embarrassed and frustrated. “I can’t figure out what they’re trying to tell us. All I know is that they’re an intelligent lifeform. I don’t know if there’s just one of them or billions of them, or if they’re more advanced than us or less advanced, or if they’re friendly or…”

“Hey, man, it’s fine,” Mickey interrupts, determined not to let his disappointment show. Ian doesn’t like not knowing stuff; it stresses him out. “Look, if they wanted to kill us they could have just crashed into us. They wouldn’t even have felt it. Let’s just… get as much as we can before they move on.”

For the next seventy-two hours, Mickey barely sleeps.

He gets methodical about it. He starts off by repeating the English alphabet over the comms, over and over again. Then Ian transmits a bunch of code in binary. After a while, a clear pattern starts to emerge in the responses - the same bizarre, warped, digital-sounding noises over and over again. There are two hundred and six phrases in total, sent on a loop. Then the aliens start sending bursts of static - one burst, three bursts, five bursts, eight bursts, thirteen bursts, twenty-one…

In the pause after the twenty-first burst, Ian looks up at Mickey over the mess of computer tablets and insta-meals that’s accumulated on the bridge. His eyes are wide and wild. “Fibonacci,” he breathes. “Mickey, that’s…”

“Fibonacci sequence,” Mickey echoes disbelievingly. He may just be a glorified janitor, but you don’t become a ship’s engineer without having a good grasp of math. “Holy _fuck_ , Ian.”

He has to lie down, then, exhausted from the lack of sleep and the insanity of what they’re doing. He closes his eyes, but opens them again when he feels gentle fingers on the back of his head, lifting it, then letting it rest somewhere softer than the deck. Ian’s lap, he realizes fuzzily. His head’s in Ian’s lap, and Ian’s fingers are combing through his hair slowly, absent-mindedly.

The bursts of white noise wash over them. They go on for a long time. They must be quite far along the sequence now.

“Do you think they’re organic?” Ian asks softly, stirring Mickey out of near-sleep. “Like you. Or do you think they’re artificial, like me?”

Mickey furrows his brow. The thought had never even occurred to him, but it makes sense. What if they’re actually communicating with some kind of computer - a massive machine launched into space in order to gather information about the universe.

“I dunno,” he says at last, the words falling loose and honest as sleep starts to claim him at last. Before he drifts away, he murmurs, “Maybe it doesn’t matter.”

 

* * *

 

The aliens change trajectory a couple of days later. First the communications cease, no matter how many times Mickey tries to prod them back to life. Then he checks the scanners and finds that the object is a couple of trillion kilometers away, with the distance increasing rapidly.

“They’re leaving,” Ian says softly. He looks exhausted, which shouldn’t really be possible for an android, but Ian’s been working overtime for days.

Mickey doesn’t say anything at first, just nods. Finally, hoarsely, he asks, “Everything backed up?”

“Yeah. On the ship’s computer, and my hard drive.”

Right. They’ve got as much information as they could. It may take years - centuries even - for scientists and linguists to piece it all together once they reach Andromeda. Mickey may well be dead by the time they figure out what the aliens were trying to say, if they were trying to say anything at all.

Mickey feels like he’s grieving. There’s this weird weight of sadness in his chest, a desperate feeling that it’s too soon, that life will always be too boring after this, that he’ll never be able to go back to the way he was before…

“Mickey!”

He jerks out of his reverie. Ian is staring at the scanners.

“What?” Mickey demands. “What is it?”

“They’re gone,” Ian says, sounding awed. "One second they were there and the next… they’re nowhere. Completely disappeared.”

“What, they fucking… teleported?” It sounds stupid to say it out loud, but after being right about aliens Mickey doesn’t care if the things he says sound stupid any more.

“Maybe,” Ian concedes. “Or they have their own version of hyperspace travel. I didn’t detect a hyperspace jump, and there’s no trace elements but… who knows what they can do.”

Mickey thinks about that for a few moments. Then he asks, “Why don’t you want to have sex with me any more?”

Ian turns away from the long range scanner console and stares. “That’s what you’re thinking about right now?” he asks, disbelievingly.

Mickey shrugs. “I’ve been thinking real big thoughts for like a week. Can’t handle it any more. I’m back to stupid, petty thoughts now.”

Ian folds his arms, suddenly looking self-conscious, guarded. “So it was bothering you? Before?”

“Yeah. I guess. Yeah.”

“You never said anything.”

“Was I s’posed to?”

“We’re here to look out for each other, Mick. If something’s wrong…”

“Woah, nuh-uh. This ain’t like me getting sick, or you getting a malfunction. It ain’t your job to make me feel better about not getting laid ever again. It ain’t your job to, you didn’t have to…” He’s all wound up now, flustered. “I wouldn’t even have… but you said you were into dudes, and that you were hot for me, but then I guess you weren’t hot for me any more so…”

“I just needed time,” Ian interrupts, his voice quiet, a little rough. “Time to figure out what I am, and what I’m not. What I could become, what I won’t ever be. You know my brain doesn’t work exactly like yours.”

Mickey tries to make sense of this. “But you weren’t, like, faking any of it?” he asks, trying to keep his voice even. “Being hot for me, or whatever.”

“That’s what I needed to figure out,” Ian replies. “One day I just got this thought in my head, like a worm or something. Something I couldn’t shake. I couldn’t stop thinking about whether I actually loved you…”

The word hits Mickey like a sucker-punch to the stomach. Neither of them has ever said that word to each other, not even speculatively.

“...Or if it was just part of my programming, to feel that way about you. To want to have sex with you. If that’s one of the reasons I’m really here.” Ian’s voice is tight now, clipped.

At last, Mickey gets it. Ian is afraid that he’s just a sex-bot, like his technological ancestors, provided for Mickey’s entertainment. Honestly, Mickey’s had the same thought once or twice in the past. But that’s bullshit, that’s…

“Bullshit,” Mickey says out loud. “You’re just having, like…”

“An existential crisis?” Ian smiles sadly. “Maybe.”

“Is this why you wanted to try sleeping with me?” Mickey ventures. “Like, _sleeping_ sleeping?”

“Yeah, I suppose. I kept thinking about it, and I liked the idea of it. So I did it, and I liked it. I set myself to standby for eight hours and when I powered up you were there, you were the first thing I saw, and I liked it so much, Mickey. It made me happy, but I don’t know why, and I keep trying to work through my own programming, but I can’t see it all, and I don’t know…”

Ian’s agitated now, and Mickey knows him well enough after eight years to know what’s setting him off. Ian hates _not knowing_.

“We don’t gotta fuck around, if you ain’t sure,” he says gruffly, awkwardly. “If you don’t know for sure that you really want it, we can keep things the way they’ve been. But… not knowing why you want stuff, or why stuff makes you happy, and not having control over any of that… that’s not a robot thing. You don’t got the monopoly on that shit. If that’s what’s bugging you.”

Having said his piece, Mickey sets about clearing up the mess he’s made on the bridge during his week-long vigil over the comms console. Ian helps, in silence, not responding to Mickey’s little speech.

But later, when Mickey eases himself into his bed on the Observation Deck, groaning at his bone-deep exhaustion, he hears the soft pad of Ian’s feet approaching. There’s a rustle of clothing as Ian sheds his jumpsuit, then the weight of his body settling on the mattress - the skin cool now that Ian’s mind has stopped churning frantically.

Mickey finds Ian’s wrist under the covers, brushes his fingers against it, slides them up to rest in the palm of Ian’s hand.


End file.
